Assorted Prose

by John Updike

  He would laugh and shuffle the cards once more. He had a loud, easy way of riffling them together that I could never quite master. “Most of my time, Freddy, is wasted time. I’ve sat in railroad stations all day long.”

  “But isn’t there something important you should be doing?”

  “Because I’m important? You don’t understand, Freddy—importance is entirely a matter of belief. The more important you are, the less important what you do is. When you reach my stage, nothing you do matters at all. The most important thing in my life right now is to whump you at this witless game. Your draw.”

  He played to win, and I loved him for that. So many adults refuse to give a child the compliment of a contest. Now and then, as he deliberated over the upturned pile, and then plunged and took them all into his hand, I felt for an instant the decisive thrust that had carried him so far into the world of money.

  I was still groping, trying to discover in him what it was like to be rich and famous. I searched his face; it was an ugly face, a clown’s and giant’s both. His cheekbones seemed broadened by the extreme closeness of his old-fashioned, centrally parted haircut. His small slanting eyes twitched alertly in their puffy mountings of sleeplessness. His nose, battered by college football, was rose pink, and his teeth were yellowed by tobacco.

  “Someday you’ll be important,” he said suddenly.

  Startled, I lied, “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  “I think so. You’ll do it to please your mother.”

  “Really? You think she cares?”

  He didn’t answer, but instead lay down three triplets and went out. As he totted up the points caught in my hand, he said, “Don’t do everything to please your mother. It’s a mistake.”

  It was the only advice my uncle ever gave me, and I am not sure I understand it still. I have, in an unimportant way, become important; if I died tomorrow, I might receive three or four inches in the Times—about as much, say, as the mother superior of an upstate nunnery. I have taken a slower, more scholarly route than my uncle, and the other day, in reading a treatise on fools, I encountered a certain King Suibhne, of ancient Ireland, who abruptly became a fool in the tumult of battle: “Unsteadiness, restlessness, and unquiet filled him, likewise disgust with every place in which he used to be and desire for every place which he had not reached.” I recognized the sensations. They are ours, the Manatees’. I feel now how my father roved the streets, seeking good to do, because he was possessed by “disgust with every place in which he used to be and desire for every place which he had not reached.” And my uncle, too, though he sought to escape the curse by remaining in a chair, was an unquiet traveller; the family discontent vibrated in him until he collapsed. Because shuffling cards and striking matches were the most strenuous things I ever saw him do, when I heard of his first heart attack it seemed a mistake. How could a man overwork his heart when he was always sitting with his feet preeningly stretched out before him?

  The summer after the winter of his first attack I was invited, alone, to visit his home in Rye, New York. They lived in a big white house on what seemed to my semirural eyes a rather small lawn. My aunt’s flower-and-vegetable garden took up most of the land. I was disappointed that the difference between their house and ours was one of degree rather than kind. A maid came in on Mondays and Fridays, and in the living room there was a panelled closet full of liquor bottles, with a faucet for water and a small pine counter like a bar; otherwise it was a house like ours, with rooms (only more) and rugs (only deeper) and chairs and windows and books. Their bookcases smelled like my parents’ college yearbooks and held dark brown Modern Library editions from the twenties, with jiggly type and stingy margins, and an English edition of Ulysses bearing a longbow on the spine. I opened Ulysses and was appalled, in the middle of a blank August afternoon, by the keen scent of death the packed words gave off; my uncle had long ago marked a few passages in the margins, and his pencillings were like the tracks of someone who had preceded me through Hell.

  I was fifteen that summer and stayed two weeks, reading books and mowing the lawn and playing badminton with my cousins. Several times my aunt drove me into Manhattan. She became confiding; as an only child I was susceptible to adult confidences. She told me about my uncle’s heart. It had been weakened by his work, his weight, his total lack of exercise, his drinking, his smoking, and—her eyes suddenly glittered with tears, making my stomach clench—his lack of will to live. “He doesn’t care enough, Freddy, if he lives or dies; he just doesn’t see that great a difference.” But my attention had snagged on the first thing she had said. His work? But many days he came home from New York on the shoppers’ train, and some days he did not go in at all, just loafed around the house in his bathrobe all morning and had lunch by himself at a restaurant in downtown Rye. Though he and Aunt Thelma never quarrelled in my presence, I soon learned to detect, from the atmosphere in the house, when he had returned with liquor on his breath. His doctors had ordered him to stop smoking and drinking.

  In the evenings, often, my cousins and my aunt would go to bed while my uncle and I sat up playing gin rummy. As soon as his wife’s footsteps hit the stair, he would take a rumpled pack of Camels out of his pocket and begin to smoke. His big, crimped, clownish mouth did not so much smoke the cigarettes as swallow them; one after another they vanished in front of his face, and the light of the bridge lamp over his shoulder turned blue. When it was my turn to shuffle, he would go to the panelled closet; there would be a soft tinkling noise, and he would bring back a glass of ice cubes and amber liquid. I would drink ginger ale to keep him company; many nights I drank a whole quart. We often stayed up past one o’clock, and, though little was said that did not relate to the cards, I felt trusted. My parents kept regular hours, so the region of time beyond midnight still held a romance for me. As the sounds of traffic outside dwindled to an occasional speeder spurting from one horizon of silence to another, my uncle and I seemed to be travelling together like two card players on a perfectly greased train riding absolutely level tracks into a hushed beyond where his harrowed, puffy face was no longer ugly but utterly appropriate, like an angel’s in ether. His presence, in the beginning a mere inflated projection on the flat facts of his fame and wealth, was given a shadowy third dimension by what I knew now of his life. His attack had caused my parents to reminisce about him. He had been the precocious, favored baby of my grandmother’s house; he had had a double aptitude, for drawing and mathematics, and had resolved it into the ambition to be an architect. He had finished half his training, when his father, in a swift street accident, died, leaving nothing but debts. He had faced the choice of completing his training and beginning his years of apprenticeship, or of quitting and immediately helping my father support their mother; with his slightly brusque decisiveness, he had chosen the latter. Henceforth he lived, as my father put it, “by his wits,” and apparently thrived. Their mother lived for twenty more years.

  Invariably he kept the score of our games, in precise pencilled numerals, the fours closed at the top, the ones fashioned like small sevens. After several glasses of amber liquid, his architect’s printing would become mechanically small and even, and all his motions took on the deliberately slowed efficiency of someone determined to complete a distasteful job. When he finished a pack of Camels, he would crumple it in his hand and stuff the paper ball back into his coat pocket. Once he paused and showed the crumpled pack to me. It lay in his wide white palm like a garish pill, or like a tinfoil-headed beetle with a camel’s brown sneer buckled into its back. “You needn’t tell Thelma about this,” he said mildly, stuffing it into his pocket and drawing out a fresh pack. He took care to return the red cellophane strip to his pocket.

  “Should you be doing it?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure,” he said, huffing through his pink nose with an asthmatic effort I had not noticed before. “I’m an old expert, Freddy, at taking care of myself. In forty-nine years I’ve never had an accident.”

  And, anxio
us to win, I obligingly shuffled another hand, and he heaved to his feet through the blue veil and went to hover, tinkling, at the bar. I suppose I felt that beating him at cards would somehow give me access—if not now, later—to the millions I imagined he had won from the world. In fact, his fortune, inscrutably submerged in loans and options and fractional titles to property, was not so large as my family had thought; his sole bequest to me was a beautiful suitcase of English leather, which I still use.

  I never told my aunt how my uncle drank and smoked, though several times an opportunity for telling seemed to have been created. I was fifteen and assumed that adults were their own responsibility. I was flattered by his trust and do not believe now that my betraying it would have significantly added to her knowledge, or helped anyone. Nevertheless, when my mother, one noon in the following autumn, came back from the telephone with a shocked face and told us, “Ed died this morning,” I had this sharp sense, for all the intervening distance, of witnessing my uncle’s death.

  OUTING

  A Family Anecdote

  PRIMITIVE PEOPLE, authorities assert, imagine the word to have power over the thing. Do civilized people believe otherwise? When Harriet Pick, for instance, marries Kenneth Shovel in Oklahoma City, papers in Toronto and Miami carry the news, and Coronet and Time find space in one of their jocular departments, and Mr. and Mrs. Shovel must begin to wonder if in truth they are, as they seem to each other, flesh and blood, and not a pair of implements.

  My own marriage was bothered by a verbal coincidence, one so small I thought it would slip by unnoticed. My wife’s maiden name was Pennington, and the Updikes came, two generations back, from Pennington, New Jersey. Our farm there was sold, and fragments of the family settled variously in Connecticut, Kansas, Florida, and Trenton—a typical enough episode in the American dispersal.* My grandfather went to Trenton; my father, the year I was born, came to live in Pennsylvania. All Updikes of my father’s generation had a special feeling about the town of Pennington: it was the family Paradise out of whose inheritance they had been cheated. Cain and Abel and Seth, as boys, must have had a similar feeling about Eden. Adam and Eve were in this case the many sons and daughters of Samuel Updike, the Creator. On meeting my fiancée, a Connecticut uncle pronounced with religious satisfaction, “At last: the Updikes are returning to Pennington!” The completion of the cycle moved me little. In the scale of the myth I was in the remote position of Seth’s son Enos, if not a remoter.

  I was alarmed to detect, therefore, the strengthening determination of my mother and father to take Mary Pennington to Pennington. There was no one there to visit. The Updikes who had not left had died; the land had swallowed the name. Even Updike Road, along whose length every farm for miles was once owned by the family, had probably been rechristened. But my father had been infected by an idea. The germ may have been my uncle’s joyful exclamation; it imposed on the coincidence a clan-sized importance. It gave my father that sensation he sometimes had, of all Updikes, quick and dead, watching him. He must do right, somehow. Then, a mathematically-minded man, he was drawn into the geometry of making tangent the two Penningtons so strangely disposed at the extremities of his life—the one his father’s birthplace, the other his son’s bride. With these calculations anticipations of pleasure began to mingle. Pennington, throne of earthly goodness, rose before him in all its verdure and birdsong. Memories of boyhood trips assailed him; apple trees and iridescent livestock filled his mind’s eye. Siren voices called from across the Delaware.

  This is conjecture; when I ask him now about the trip to Pennington, he only says, “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking of.”

  Why my mother helped the idea along is even more obscure. She had been born in Pennsylvania; there was no tug in her blood toward New Jersey. However, she did have a love of words and a vague sense that when Mary came to visit us we should “entertain” her. Judged purely as a verbal concept, “taking Mary Pennington to Pennington, New Jersey,” was more entertaining than taking her to the Ephrata Cloisters or the Gettysburg Battlefield, an equivalent distance away. Further, my mother had an educational impulse that she was unable to express directly; it was a grave thing, she felt from her experience, for a woman to marry an Updike, to take upon herself that droll, pointed, yet curiously restless and unresolved name. She felt this gravity, yet had never been able quite to put her finger on its source, and hoped (I surmise) that an entry into Pennington might reveal to Mary’s unaided intuition the weight and shape of the burden she had consented to assume. Also, my mother must have expected, as we all did, that something, something magic, would happen.

  Mary came to visit us for a week early in the June we were to be married late in. She scarcely knew, that overcast morning, why she was being swept into the car, and I was helpless to prevent it. I had always been helpless in regard to my parents’ car trips. Again and again in my formative years, carsick and heartsick, I had been transported through endless tracts of Eastern Standard Time to a destination I despised. Like baptism and death, it was a mysterious necessity—the experience, perhaps, with which Americans earn their citizenship.

  We sat, my parents in front and Mary and I in back, in attentive and respectful postures, worshipping the mumble of the motor. Inches above our heads stretched the familiar seamed firmament, abysmally neutral in color and ornamented with a celluloid icon of the dead sun. The blank, hairy backs of my parents’ disembodied heads seemed idols adored by an unspeakable cult. What with the jiggle, the intertwining cries of motor and tires, the idiot flicker of scenery at the windows, the smell of poisonous gas, and the taste of stirred-up car-seat dust, our senses became dulled. My parents’ talk grew wilder. My mother talked about Updikes, searching for the dark thing that was to say about them. One of them had owned Coney Island when it was worthless. The Rhode Island Updikes had played host to Bishop Berkeley and then gone sterile. The oldest one in the Genealogy had been discovered on his knees in Cologne Cathedral, doing penance for some—annoyingly—unnamed offense. They were very petty knights. Their arms were a star, a tongs, and a pineapple. Once my mother turned and saw me resting my head in weariness on Mary’s shoulder. “Don’t lean, Johnny!” she cried. “Sit up. That’s what they do, Mary. They lean on you.” My father undertook to recite everyone who had ever hurt his feelings, an expanding list that went back to, but did not include, Samuel Updike, who had given him a penny when he was two. My mother accused him of being suicidal and screamed whenever a truck came down the highway at us.

  “Get on your side, Wesley.”

  “It’s where you’re sitting, Linda. It’s an optical illusion. I know what it looks like, it looks like those fenders are in your lap, but I’m way the hell over.”

  “Don’t involve me in your suicide,” my mother insisted. “I never heard of such a coward that wouldn’t commit suicide when he was alone in the car but had to take his whole family with him. Did you, Mary?”

  Beside me, Mary grew pale and pursed her lips stubbornly. It was not only the discomforts of the back seat; my father, without cracking a smile, had begun to twitch the wheel at oncoming vehicles.

  “Oh—didn’t that girl have a curious expression on her face,” my mother said abruptly, determined to “rise above” his teasing.

  I asked, “What girl?”

  “At the hot-dog place. She’s gone now.”

  Mary, unable to believe the literal sense of what she had been hearing, had deduced that my parents spoke in allegories, and believed that her own expression, glimpsed by my mother in the rear-view mirror, had been meant. Her lips grew grimmer. My father, bouncing with undiminished speed over some road construction, knocked her pocketbook off her lap. The motion of the car, at the start a sign of our life, now seemed as inert and helpless as the fall of a planet through vacant space.

  From the height of the Burlington–Bristol Bridge the Delaware resembled a black-shellacked floor nicked by furniture legs. The sun came out as we reached the New Jersey side. In the new sta
te, our mission changed complexion. The sun sparkled on the roadside trees, the Coca-Cola signs, the brilliantined heads of youths in convertibles. Small cities succeeded one another. The American summer reigned on high; its harsh poetry glinted from mica sidewalks and plate-glass windows. Everywhere we looked, as countless as stars in the desert night, were those oblongs of radiance smeared wherever the metal of an automobile curves into an angle reflecting the sun. Concrete and metal dissolved in these highlights. The deepening beauty of the countryside promised to redeem our project. With the insertion of Mary Pennington into Pennington, New Jersey, some illuminating coruscation, some life-enhancing bang was bound to occur. As the number of miles to Pennington diminished on the road signs, and my hopes grew higher, I was conscious of being lifted away from my bride-to-be; she, resenting the unity of expectation I enjoyed with my parents, and resenting her demotion to the status of a catalyst, had become sullen.

  Pennington was a pleasant enough town, with a more up-to-date air than I had been led to expect. My father parked on the main street near a drugstore. A teen-age girl in shorts walked by, licking an ice-cream cone. Contrasted to our captivity in the car, she had a wonderful freedom and, to my eyes, a tragic inaccessibility. Not only had she blossomed, with an independence almost impudent, a hundred miles from where I could have observed her, but the entire season of life she represented, with her brown legs and her ice-cream cone, my marriage would end for me forever.

  My parents, turning their heads minimally, peeked at Mary.